“1 minute remaining! Make sure your dishes are ready! ” The children quickly prepare their dish to serve judges Gordon Ramsay, Christina Tosi, and Graham Elliot. I’ve always enjoyed watching the TV show Masterchef Junior, where bright, little kids gather from all over United States to cook and win the title of “Masterchef Junior”. I didn’t know how to cook, but I was inspired by how these little kids could cook to the same extent as the average adult. I took pleasure in watching them cook, but never thought about watching my mother do so. Fast forward to a typical weekday after school.
It is 8pm and I’m rushing to finish hours of homework after coming home late from school. Suddenly, my mom calls me to eat dinner and I constantly tell her “in a minute! ” (although it takes longer than that). My mom replies with “Does biology homework feed you? ” What my mother said was true; I, and many other children, are dependent on our parents for food and shelter. Despite how important education is, it cannot compensate for learning to survive. I’ve never heard of a cooking elective at Stuyvesant High School or at any school open house I attended.
Remembering the Masterchef shows I used to love and watch, I told myself that by the end of 9th grade summer, I would learn how to cook. When the I-Search project was given out, it was obvious to me what my I-Search should have been. But cooking is a part of every country’s culture, each with its own unique food and flavors! I chose to stick with my mother’s cooking: Chinese food. I wanted to become a great cook just like my mother so that when she grows old, I can be like her and take care of my family. My first approach was to find an article online about cooking.
One of the first relevant thing I found was a written interview named “Bringing Scrutability to Chinese Cooking” hosted by Nancy Jenkins and featured in the New York Times. The interviewee was Lily Lee Levin, who was “born and raised in China . . . an enthusiastic exponent of the art of Chinese cooking” and published her own book “Lily’s Way” (Jenkins). Mrs. Levin learned to cook from her family cook. She talks about how learning Chinese cooking isn’t as difficult as one would think it is: “ ‘People say about Chinese cooking:
One, you use a lot of ingredients I’ve never seen before, and two, there’s a lot of chopping, it’s a lot of work-but that’s not true,’ ”. That was strange because my mom always said that cooking was a lot of work. What followed afterwards surprised me. “ ‘You don’t need a wok [a Chinese tool used for cooking], you don’t need a cleaver and you don’t need special ingredients. ’ She went on to describe her formula: ‘P-O-S-S, pepper, oil, salt, and sugar, that’s the basis’ ” (Levin). The rest of the article talked about several methods to cooking certain food, which was currently irrelevant to me.
I was unsure whether I should fully accept Mrs. Levin’s argument. On one hand, Mrs. Levin was a true Chinese chef and is very knowledgeable. On the other hand, my mother would always use a wok to cook Chinese food and would also use different sauces such as soy sauce that are not mentioned in Mrs. Levin’s formula. In search for more answers, I went to find an interview with someone with experience cooking, besides my mom, to understand how Chinese cooking should be like. During class, when we did a share, one of the few people who approached me was Bill Ni. He told me to come to his house to watch him cook.
At first, I was dubious because I had never came to a friend’s house and I wasn’t sure about his experience with cooking. When he told me that he learned how to cook three years ago, I knew he was the right guy. Not only was he around my age (which makes understanding him easier), but Bill was also very experienced for his age. We scheduled our interview through Facebook and we decided that it should take place on Wednesday, March 30th after school at Bill’s house. So directly after school, I followed Bill from Stuyvesant and took the train with him to Flushing. When we arrived there, I was greeted by his mother.
When I entered their house, they immediately began the cooking process. The first thing Bill showed me how to cook is rice. To do this, he puts the rice into a pot and pours cold water until the water is about an inch high from the bottom of the pot. You have to wash rice, not too many times though. After this step, you would pour a little more cold water onto the pot and you put in a rice cooker. Bill also showed me how to cook egg fried rice. First, you put oil in a wok to begin cooking. The purpose of the oil is to make sure the rice doesn’t stick to the wok.
He then put day-old cooked rice because freshly cooked rice has water, which doesn’t mix with oil. He placed eggs and mixed the eggs and rice while the fire was on high. When the smell of fried eggs filled the air, then he knew he was done. After he was done cooking, I interviewed him about his experience on cooking. Bill told me that he had never had any professional cooking and that he learned to cook by watching his mom. His inspiration for cooking came from watching TV cooking shows and to pass down tradition. He appreciates cooking because it is “like an art”.
When I asked him how he thought American food differed from Chinese food, Bill said: “It’s [American food] good, but it doesn’t possess an ‘ethnicity’ ”. What he meant by this was that Chinese food has a common, more healthier diet while American food is usually larger, and more fat-based. For example, Chinese food usually features rice or noodle with soy sauce as a condiment. When I asked Bill how he believed the ideal Chinese food should taste like, he passionately responded: “Chinese food is like Buddhism… it’s not as overwhelming [short-lived], but the flavor punches your tongue.
This perfectly describes his favorite Chinese food: pan-seared dumplings. Strangely enough, both Bill and Mrs. Levin were taught to cook Chinese food by someone close to them. I decided that my next step would be to seek out more detailed information about what there is to the cooking process of Chinese food. And the most nearby and reliable source is none other than my mom. But before my mom, I had to first confront another print source, one that would have hopefully add on to or change my current view of Chinese cooking. Through ProQuest, I found another source in the Vegetarian journal. I was astounded by what I read.
According to the author Yasmin Rabdob’s article “Chinese Cooking From a Study Abroad Student”, the Chinese food I was trying to learn how to cook was never authentic Chinese food: “what we consider Chinese food is honestly not at all what authentic Chinese food truly is . . . Vegetable Lo Mein . . . dumplings . . . and (of course) General Tso’s Chicken. It wasn’t until I took a course in Asian American History and lived abroad in China that I realized American Chinese cuisine isn’t Chinese cuisine… for example in Nanjing [a part of East China], over half of the foods I listed above will not be on the menu.
A lot of the foods on a menu at an American Chinese restaurant have invented names that don’t exist in Mandarin . . . do not exist in China. ” I never thought about what type of “Chinese” food I wanted to cook? I simply wanted to learn how to cook Chinese food that was common in the Chinese household. I didn’t want to be a chef of a five-star restaurant, but I did want to learn to cook delicious, not extremely hard-to-make food. Finally, I needed to approach my mom, who cooked delicious food for me and my sister for dinner almost everyday.
I watched her cook ma po tofu, a Chinese dish which consists tofu, chicken, and shrimp and it is one of her best dishes! First, she cut some onions and garlic into the size of salt grains. Then, my mom added a spoon of olive oil and spread it throughout the empty wok as the fire is on high. She then adds the tofu and lowers the fire after the onion is light-golden brown. Afterwards, she added already prepared shrimp and chicken, and added dark and light soy sauce. She then poured some water to dilute the soy sauce and added a tad bit of sugar and flour.
She takes a small spoon and takes part of the sauce and tested its flavor. She then continued mixing until the tofu is submerged in sauce and has a brown-yellow color. Then, it was ready to serve! I was surprised by how short it took to cook the dish. My mother always said that preparing the ingredients takes many hours because you have to clean the ingredient and make sure it is done right. In comparison, all the mixing and cooking only took about 20 minutes. From then on, I watched my mom cook other dishes.
One of her other dishes that I felt highlighted Mrs. Levin’s description of Chinese cooking was her sour vegetable with beef. The first step she did was add 2 spoons of olive oil, enough so that it wouldn’t stick to the wok, but not too much as to make the food all oily. She diced onions and garlic, put them on the wok, and turned the fire to high. She then put the raw chopped beef and sour vegetables, and began mixing. The mixing took around 15 minutes and in addition, my mom added tomatoes, yellow pepper, and two spoons of sugar. Occasionally, she would put her hand on the beef and taste it, to check whether it had the right flavor.
This follows from Mrs. Levin’s formula of “P-O-S-S”, which stands for pepper, oil, salt, and sugar. This balance of flavors made my mother’s Chinese dish unbelievably delicious. I am the type of person who lacks memorization skills, but watching my mom cook slowly drilled into my head the essentials of cooking Chinese food. From what I noticed, I can summarize a few basic rules on Chinese food from all the sources I retrieved. One, Chinese food is simply food with the smart application of numerous tools and seasoning to enhance the flavors.
Some of these flavors are usually dominant, but are integrated with opposite flavors. Two, Chinese food requires a certain amount of diligence and patience, but those who wait are often rewarded with the best-tasting food. Last but not least, cooking is an endless cycle influenced by the society around us. As Mr. Rabdob said, Chinese food has gone through stages of evolution from China to America. This will keep evolving with new technology and new culture to produce the best flavors. Finally, I asked my mom about when she learned to cook.
She told me that while her education wasn’t that good, she would look at her mom cook and gradually learn how to do so. When I asked her what age did she learn to cook, she replied with a “I don’t remember”, but she most likely learned it around my sister’s age (11-13). I learned that the way to approach cooking isn’t just defining what I want to cook and reading recipes; one has to see cooking in motion or be in motion himself to feel cooking. This is very much similar to math; one absorbs much more info trying to solve and tackle the problem than look through a bunch of formulas, hoping to find the one that works.
In addition, cooking is a never-ending, trial-and-error process. There are tons of food combinations, each with its distinct and unique twist. I am a novice at cooking and still am. But I’ve learned a lot about Chinese food, and am even more passionate about learning to cook and bringing out the strong flavors in the dish. While Chinese cooking can be described in many ways, it is more realized when you have felt it with your own taste buds so many times it makes you think “yum! ”
